EEbeat

Using Twitter a day will keep the doctor away.
That’s right, forget having that daily apple, your health may very well be improved simply by using Twitter through well…. Apple. And it’s all account of engineers.
What am I talking about? Well, since Twitter is built on open source software, Twitter engineers use, contribute to and release a lot of open source software. As a result, data analysts have now conducted tests that enable them – within 90 percent accuracy – to predict when an otherwise healthy person will come down with the flu based on Twitter data. Eventually it will allow people to receive notices on their smartphone when they’ve entered a public place with a high incidence of flu, which they can subsequently choose to avoid.
For a self-professed germ-a-phobe like myself, this is music to my ears, not only because I keep an oversized bottle of Germ-X near my computer at all times (true!) but because this is a great example of engineers having a finger on the pulse of technology and behavior – the essence of what engineers do.
Now engineers around the country – and indeed the world – are taking these ideas to the next level, and we should too.
We’ve all seen commercials from Nike where some world-class athlete is vigorously exercising while hooked up to some machine that is charting every nuance of their body (IE: heart rate, etc.).
For avid runners and bikers, monitors from Nike are available for the “not” world-class athlete (read: the rest of us!), but often for a steep, monetary price.
Well, engineers were the driving forces behind those advances and now engineering students and faculty at Oregon State University have developed, are patenting, and planning to take to market technology that can monitor vital signs with sensors so miniscule and inexpensive they could fit on a small adhesive bandage, at a cost of less than 25 cents each. Progress.
According to the university – with support from private industry – it expects to move the sensor-packed microchip, roughly the size and thickness of a postage stamp, into the consumer marketplace sometime in 2013.
“We can now make important biomedical measurements more portable, routine, convenient and affordable than ever before,” says Patrick Chiang, associate professor in Oregon State University’s School of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science.
Most importantly, the sensors are non-invasive, and will stick to the skin to monitor anything from atrial fibrillation in heart patients to brain signals in those with dementia to physical activity in those trying to lose weight. It will also wirelessly tether to cell phones, and the team has funding, Chiang says, to develop an app and Cloud monitoring for storing the data collected.
Of course, this data mining is now being applied to other areas as well – either to be predictive or to simply understand a wide swath of sentiments around the world.
Recently, Silicon Graphics International, a leader in technical computing, partnered with researchers from the University of Illinois to scan international tweets in a project dubbed the “Global Twitter Heartbeat.”
By using SGI’s UV 2000 Big Brain supercomputer, the researchers created real-time heat maps of positive and negative sentiments expressed via Twitter during Hurricane Sandy.
As you can imagine, there were quite a few negative tweets, many of which not suitable for a family trade magazine!
In fact, the same principles may yet already be upon us if we want to refine our social lives, and engineers should be curious enough to make it happen.
Let’s see, planning a vacation and want to know about a region’s eating habits, which areas prefer specific types of beer or looking for fans of trivia in your city? Check the data – it’s like social GPS!
And I say if there is not an engineer somewhere working on that ability right now, they certainly should be.
Of course, I do see a downside, albeit a (somewhat) small one.
Down the line I’m sure some retailers will be none too pleased when they realize that masses of people are avoiding certain city streets (like where there storefront is located) because they have been informed that there is a high potential to get a cold in that area, or maybe because they want to avoid a high concentration of dogs being walked, for instance.
What I would say is that if that were to happen, those people using Twitter to avoid illness day to day will – in the long term – be the ones coming back to those stores, and for many more years, thanks to the work and ingenuity of engineers.